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Among the ruins of empire

VOGELSANG, Germany — In the heart of a forest in the eastern part of Germany, a deserted hall in an abandoned building bears powerful witness to the past few decades of history and transition in Europe.

The large, rectangular room, unused since the early 1990s, is all but empty. At one end, just in front of a low, raised stage, a broken piano lies on the floor, its keyboard splayed out like a grin - or a grimace.

To the left, a mural covers the better part of one wall; in bright primary colors it portrays a complex universe of military and industrial might, centered on a helmeted soldier and cheered on by a joyous family group leaping in the air against the background of a hammer and sickle.

The wall behind the little stage is covered by another mural: a giant portrait of Lenin superimposed on a billowing red flag.

The paint, though, is cracked and peeling. Lenin's face is a disintegrating mosaic, flaking and fading and falling away in big chunks, like cast-off bits of memory.

The hall is in a building that once formed part of a Soviet military base called Havel, about 70 kilometers, or 45 miles, north of Berlin outside the hamlet of Vogelsang. The base was named for the nearby Havel River, a tributary of the Elbe that meanders through a picturesque network of lakes and canals.

At the end of the 1980s, Havel was home to 15,000 or more Soviet troops. They were part of about 380,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in East Germany, by far the largest Soviet military contingent in any country of the former East bloc.

Soviet troops had remained in Eastern Europe after World War II, serving, as a Radio Free Europe analyst once put it, "as occupiers, as props for the local Communist regimes and as the leading echelons of a potent Soviet offensive capability."

But in December 1988, as part of his reformist agenda, President Mikhael Gorbachev announced that Moscow would start pulling out some of its forces. The Berlin Wall came down less than a year later, followed by German reunification in October 1990. The last Red Army soldiers left what had been the German Democratic Republic in August 1994.

Today, Havel is a decaying ghost town, a strange, spooky reminder of cold-war confrontation, slowly being swallowed by the forest. Its buildings are gradually being torn down and the land returned to nature. Deep wells and other man-made spaces are to be left as habitats for bats and owls.

A friend and I visited Havel in May, by coincidence almost 60 years to the day after the Nazi surrender brought World War II to a close in Europe.

Our guide was Rainer Lebelt, the retired mayor of Vogelsang and a font of knowledge about the former base and its history. Lebelt, who had worked in the construction industry, had put in pipelines and other infrastructure at Havel and had even helped build its scallop-roofed café.

Though only a few kilometers from Lebelt's home, most parts of the base are not accessible by car, so we rode there on bicycles down bumpy trails through a thick forest of mixed hardwood and evergreens.

On either side of the road, we passed beech trees whose smooth, silver bark was scored by Cyrillic inscriptions, now rendered by time almost illegible.

"Havel was a real city," Lebelt said, as, once at the main caserne area, we wheeled our bikes past fallen lampposts, blank notice boards, empty barracks and other silent, gaping structures. "Families lived here," he said, "and there were schools, a cinema, a bakery, a hospital. It had its own water system and power."

We paused while I took a picture of a corroded spotlight pointing up at what was once some sort of angular monument: A sapling was growing, somehow, where the light bulb used to be.

A bit later, a hare burst out of a clump of brush and sprinted away through the weeds.

During the cold war, the Soviet Army occupied 240,000 hectares, about 590,000 acres, in East Germany - roughly the size of the western German state of Saarland. Lebelt said that the entire Havel military zone had covered 7,000 hectares, most of it open land used as a training area for tanks and artillery.